This section provides background information related to the present disclosure which is not necessarily prior art.
At present, with growth of user's requirements for video images, captions in the video images are used more and more widely.
For example, users studying English need to hide all or part of English captions during the process of studying English through videos, so as to test their understanding of English. For family users, during the process of displaying videos, it is necessary to shield sensitive vocabularies for minors.
At present, there are two manners for displaying the captions, i.e., external captions and embedded captions. For the external captions, the external captions files are separate from video files. The external captions are imported when videos are displayed. For the embedded captions, embedded caption files have already been integrated into video files. Content of the embedded captions are included in the video files, and are not split from the video files.
At present, there are two methods widely used for shielding a caption, wherein the methods for shielding a caption are also called as methods for hiding a caption. A first method is to adopt “hiding” setting option provided by video displaying software. Main shortcomings of the method include: 1) the method is only for the external captions; 2) a time period in which the captions are hid can not be selected flexibly, and users have to handoff “displaying/hiding” setting option repeatedly when the captions need to be hid in a part of time; 3) a part of the external captions includes two languages, if it is set to hide the captions, it may be not implemented to only hide one of the two languages. A second method is to hide the captions by editing the files of the external captions manually. Characters to be hid are deleted from the files of the external captions, so as to implement hiding the captions. Main shortcoming of this method include: 1) the method is only for the external captions; 2) because there are varieties of formats of the external files (such as ssa, ass, srt, and so on), the users need to edit each variety of the external captions, and handle each variety of the external captions differently; 3) the captions hiding cannot be adjusted dynamically, thus, user's requests cannot be responded to in time; and 4) when users need to display the hid captions, the captions files which have already been deleted need to be re-edited.
It can be seen from the above that conventional methods for hiding a caption are only for external captions, and cannot implement hiding captions flexibly.